Weekend Box Office: ‘The Nun’ Conjures a Franchise-Best Debut

The Nunis not only the latest spinoff from The Conjuring franchise, it’s now scored the biggest opening in the franchise’s history. The horror film also became the second-biggest opening in history for any September release, whether it involved any kind of conjuring or not. Here’s the full weekend box office chart:

Film

Weekend

Per Screen

Total

1

The Nun

$53,500,000

$13,803

$53,500,000

2

Crazy Rich Asians

$13,600,000 (-38%)

$3,519

$136,222,165

3

Peppermint

$13,260,000

$4,450

$13,260,000

4

The Meg

$6,030,000

$1,717

$131,572,774

5

Searching

$4,515,000 (-25%)

$2,247

$14,311,130

6

Mission: Impossible — Fallout

$3,800,000 (-46%)

$1,628

$212,116,767

7

Christopher Robin

$3,196,000 (-39%)

$1,269

$91,725,090

8

Operation Finale

$3,043,000 (-49%)

$1,674

$14,107,446

9

Alpha

$2,505,000 (-44%)

$994

$32,447,518

10

BlacKkKlansman

$1,565,000 (-62%)

$1,012

$43,454,530

The original Conjuring from 2013 was the previous high-water mark for the series in terms of opening weekends, with $41.8 million. The Nun’s $53.5 million blows that out of the (holy) water, and its $131 million worldwide after just three days in theaters is an incredible feat for an R-rated spinoff from a movie about cantankerous ghosts. (Not to mention one that cost just $22 million.) It’s truly a shocking outcome for this series that started as a surprise hit a few years ago. Its C CinemaScore is not good, but the film is already a big hit no matter what it does from here.

The Nun is also the first film to knock Crazy Rich Asians out of the top spot on the box-office chart after three weeks in a row as the to fop in the country. Dropping an estimated 38 percent from last weekend, the film grossed $13.6 million, bringing its domestic total to an impressive $136.2 million. (It’s grossed an additional $28.5 million internationally.) It’s already the 13th biggest film of 2018, and it will pass Ready Player One and Ocean’s 8 and inch closer to the top ten in a matter of days. (It’ll probably take another week or two to pass the number 10 film, Hotel Transylvania 3.)

Third place on the box-office chart belonged to the other wide release of the weekend: Jennifer Garner’s Peppermint, a revenge thriller with Garner assuming the role of a vigilante who swears revenge against the people who killed her family. CinemaScore voters gave the film a B+ (a lot better than critics, whose reviews yielded at 14 percent Rotten Tomatoes score) and the film grossed $13.2 million. The Meg fell to fourth place on the chart while earning another $6 million. Its $131.5 million domestic total is a decent number; its $360.4 million internationally is insane for a movie about a giant killer shark trying to eat Jason Statham. Rounding out the top five was the innovative thriller Searching starring John Cho; after three weeks the film has grossed $14.3 million.

The Nun also had the weekend’s second-biggest average on a per-screen basis, with $13,803 across 3,876 screens. On just two screens, a much-smaller movie called Kusama: Infinity, a documentary about the famous artist, had a better average. It made $30,400 on two screens around the country, for an average of [does very complicated math things] of $15,200.